


break rhythm here;

by TomBowline



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Coming Untouched, Established Relationship, Face-Sitting, First Time, Genderqueer James Fitzjames (1813-c.1848), James Fitzjames (1813-c.1848) Wears a Dress, Oral Sex, Other, Porn with Feelings, Post-Canon, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Trans Male Character, Trans Male Francis Crozier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:06:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27413197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TomBowline/pseuds/TomBowline
Summary: “Francis,” James sighed. “You must know I’m well enough now to do almost anything I should like to.” He slipped one leg up Francis’ flank as he said it, satin sliding over cotton. “And I should very much like you to have me.”Fill for akinkmeme promptAND for Trans Terror Week day 3, "A Queer and Pleasant Danger"!
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 8
Kudos: 67
Collections: Trans Terror Week





	break rhythm here;

**Author's Note:**

> me as francis crozier's therapist: hmm. yes i see. my professional advice is you need to get your pussy ate
> 
> (title from gerrit lansing’s “a poem of love in eleven lines”, content warnings in end notes)

It would be factually false to say that telling James what he was had been the hardest task Francis had ever faced. In the past year alone, he had left dead men where they dropped to conserve the energy of the survivors, said services for sailors who died after rescue had already come, hanged two strong and able men when death was already so rife among them. But sitting in their little cabin aboard the Enterprise, safe and whole and on the way to well, and searching for the words to explain something that could spell the end of the bright and delicate thing unfolding between them— It had felt almost more trying than anything that had come before. The pain would be of a different breed, after all, should James think the worse of him for it - it would be the wincing, terribly personal danger of showing one’s belly and one’s breast at once. But he loved - _Is not that strange?_ \- he loved James too well not to make a go of explaining himself. 

The words, when he located them, had been sour leaving his mouth: _I was not built as other men_. There had been more, fumbling, meandering, crude sentences, but this was the essence of it. He had braced, tense, for the response - had only let himself hope to be let down easy. But James had smiled a tremulous little smile, leaned up from where he was reclining in his bunk, and slipped one large hand ‘round Francis’ hunched shoulder. Asked in his voice like burnished brass, still bruised around the edges, _May I kiss you again?_

Presently James had confessed, in turn, his own anomalous construction: not in body, but in soul, he felt more kin to woman sometimes than to man - and often, indeed, he felt most kin to neither. They had held each other there, with Francis squeezed into the tiny berth beside James’ great folded form, and for hours had pulled at those threads of their pasts which had never seen the light of intentional recollection: Francis’ first days as a sailor, so happy to be free of the guise of girlhood; James’ cavorting in a gown and pearls with a group of fellow mids, on the town after performing a play, and how he had reveled in the confusion of strangers as they mistook him first for a woman and then for a man; strategies of concealment, rituals of affirmation, a life lived in bald and enforced loneliness and a life full of glittering friends yet so full of secrets as to be never truly seen as oneself. By the time they had lapsed into a doze, still crammed together, the lamp was guttering and the watch was changing up on deck. From that day the understanding between them, long formed but implicit up to that point, had been doubtless and definite - where one went, so would they both. 

Once they were back on dry land, they had taken up rooms in London together - not unusual for two bachelors, two Navy men on half-pay - and had proceeded directly to be intimate far beyond the scope of camaraderie. They had lain in the same bed nearly every night, regularly kissed each other to insensibility, sat almost in each other’s laps before the fire. But they had not yet crossed that final threshold into passions truly carnal. James had been ill, far beyond when he had begun to look quite well again - plagued by sleeplessness, easily exhausted, frustratingly forgetful - and this extended convalescence had for months removed any lustful mood that might have otherwise taken them. Now, however—

Now James was going out again, able to withstand a full day of activity more often than not, almost vibrant with energy. And Francis felt a renewal of that queer sort of danger.

He wanted more than anything - and what a gift it was, for such an indulgent desire to be top-of-mind - to chart James’ body like a vital and intricate map, to bring him pleasure, to share in that singular expression of love with him. It was only the matter of logistics that gave him pause. His own pleasure had long been a secondary, unimportant thing; he had never been concerned with it before, but with James... He wanted, with a bitter strength, to understand his own body better than he did - to be able to share it with James, to have an outlet of expression for the depth of feeling which James’ mere proximity excited in him. He wanted it, and he did not know how to get it, and this dilemma drove him to a confounding avoidance of the whole issue. For some time he conducted his days with a startling enormity of desire bound up inside him, beating against himself like the tide against a seawall.

It was early afternoon on a day like any other when the wall finally broke. Francis came to find James in the sitting room, to enquire something or other about the state of the pantry, and found he could not regard his form - laid out on the sofa in his lavender day-dress, reading one of his novels with an air of studious concentration - without crossing the room to kiss him. The mild greeting he sent into the kiss was returned by an overwhelming ardency from James, a long and thorough diversion of stroking tongue and gently nipping teeth. James’ arms - draped half-sleeves falling back, displaying an expanse of golden skin and the muscles that were slowly returning to him - wound loose about Francis’ shoulders, and Francis found himself tucked smartly between James’ legs. He felt a sudden shift, a charge in the air that had not been there. A pang of eclipsing, heedless longing.

“Francis,” James sighed. “You must know I’m well enough now to do almost anything I should like to.” He slipped one leg up Francis’ flank as he said it, satin sliding over cotton. His head was tipped back, his throat exposed. “And I should very much like you to have me.”

The rub of it was that Francis very much wanted to. Excessively, indecorously, to distraction. He wanted to have James as many times and in as many ways as James would ask of him. As he stood in the lavender cocoon of James’ legs, as he took in his bright eyes and his awkward pleading smile and the fine column of his bare neck, he felt that want like the glare of the sun. The roiling fog of anxiety that had lain so heavy over his heart seemed suddenly far away, its reasoning flimsy and its power weakened, dissipated by the hot light of desire. He was an explorer, Francis thought, somewhat wildly. He would learn. 

“Yes,” he replied - one hand on James’ face, little finger stroking in his hair, guiding him up closer. “James, yes.” 

With a high and happy sigh James leant up the rest of the way, meeting Francis for another finely choreographed kiss. “Oh,” he gasped when they parted, “I’ve been waiting for this, Francis.”

“Have you?” Francis smiled to see James blinking back at him, mouth red and eyes wide with sincere longing. “And what have you been waiting for, precisely?” The tone of the question was teasing, but its aim was entirely earnest. 

“Hmm,” James groaned, laying himself wider open for Francis’ perusal - limbs slack and thrown about the sofa, thighs stretched wide beneath his skirts. “I want you inside of me.” A roll of his hips, a hungry little thing, not nearly enough to reach Francis’ own where he half-knelt on the cushions above James. “Splitting me open.”

This sent anxiety skipping anew across Francis’ mind - had he been somehow misunderstood, those months ago? But no, they had seen each other in undress before, James had to know— “I do not,” Francis said haltingly, “dearest, you know I do not have a cock to split you open _with_.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” James said - and with a sly smile, he took a handful of Francis’ trouser-front and squeezed, leaving Francis suddenly thunderstruck by the firm friction on his sex. “This feels to me like enough to fill me up.”

“James,” Francis began, rather distractedly, “would you be serious—”

“Or if not,” James continued, as if he had not heard - continuing to rub and pinch incorrigibly at Francis through his trousers - “those thick captain’s fingers of yours ought to do nicely.”

The growl of _Christ_ which Francis loosed then was entirely involuntary. He surged downwards to kiss James again, grounding himself in the familiarity of it - the ardent press of James’ lips, the smell of his hair, the swipe of his tongue. This he knew how to do, this exchange of spit and intimate sensation. For the rest, he would rely on James’ maddening surety to see them through.

Perhaps wisely - age and illness had ensured their joints were none of them what they used to be - they did not stage their consummation on the sofa; rather, James teetered up in a gasping rustle of skirts and led Francis to the bedroom, that warm-walled chamber of shared routine with its curtains drawn and the muted hazy light of midday filtering through. James’ deft long-fingered hands undid Francis’ braces, slipped the trousers from his hips, unraveled the tie of Francis’ drawers with two fingers while delivering another teasing stroke over the damp fabric with his wrist. Off came Francis’ waistcoat, his stock and his tie. He was permitted to keep his shirt on - perhaps _permitted_ is unfair; James tugged at the buttons and asked in a careful voice _On or off?_ to which Francis responded gruffly _On_ , and that was that - but besides that, he was bare to James in all his aging, strangely-made flesh. 

The riptide surge of nerves he felt at such openness threatened to pull him under, but for James’ hands still on his body, James’ nose in his neck, James’ lips on his collarbone. The heel of James’ palm rubbing into his sex, making his head spin. Wanted, he was wanted. He was loved. James saw him bare with his curves and softnesses and empty spaces and he saw James in his day-dress with his sharp angles and outsized limbs and they loved each other not in spite of, but especially. It made him dizzy.

When James fell back on the bed he did not pull Francis with him; this was, Francis suspected, because he knew precisely the picture he made. He melted loose and languorous atop the counterpane, hips jutting out where his legs draped wide off the bed, hard prick displayed proudly in the rumpled line of his skirts. His eyes were lidded, his mouth open, his hands thrown limp above his head. Francis leant down and placed one hand firm on James’ ruched bodice, just over his heart; he could feel the thump of James’ heartbeat and the heave of his breath, strong and wild within his scar-marked breast. He had to pause and simply feel for a moment - he felt compelled to savor the sensation of this steady drumbeat and warm thick flesh where once there had been little more than a panicked fluttering bird with skin stretched over like a fraying cloth. How close they had come, how far they were now from such horrors. In the cradle of James’ satin-clad legs, in their little bedroom with its vast soft bed, he found himself breathless with the enormity of such gifts. 

His reverie was broken by a long and peevish groan from James, accompanied by a foot hooked ‘round his leg to draw him closer. “Do come up here, Francis,” he said, and bound by such an entreaty, up he came. 

He slipped his hands up James’ skirts as he advanced, one on each trembling leg, and bared by inches the body he had seen return from the brink of oblivion. The soft hair on James’ calves, the knobbly angles of his knees, the tensing trimness of his thighs - each new detail was an impossible twofold gift, first for its existence and second for its being shared with him. He made to ruck up the skirt and pair of petticoats and settle between James’ bare legs, but his lover tutted and pulled at a knot of cords ‘round the back of his waist that sent the skirts loosening down James’ gently kicking legs to fall to the floor. “Creases,” Francis heard James explain in a somewhat distracted tone - and well he might be distracted, for the layers of satin and cotton had slipped away to reveal that James wore nothing underneath. His prick sat flushed and firming against his hiked-up thigh, his furred stones twitched tight beneath it; as he shifted his hips further upward, Francis caught sight of the tiny winking furl of his hole and once again felt short of breath. What a vision James was, chest draped modestly in purple satin above, cock and cunt bared to the world below. No, not to the world - only to Francis.

He had a time, at first, of deciding where to put his hands; James solved this problem by drawing his own prick up and out of the way with a gentle sort of petting motion and shuffling his hips up onto a pillow, baring the downy expanse of his crack to Francis’ attentive gaze. From the bedside table was produced a small bottle of oil - perhaps the same as James rubbed into his hair each week, Francis thought with a surreal sort of giddiness. He sat forward and ran one dry thumb over James’ hole, exploring; his skin was furnace-hot and indescribably soft, clutching at the pad of Francis’ finger even as the muscle beyond stayed shut fast. Drawing him in with a wordless entreaty that Francis was too happy to obey. 

Francis understood in principle how this was to go; the loosening of a man’s arsehole by greased fingers, typically to be followed by a greased prick. He was not practically experienced in the process; up until now he had been given to understand it was a bit of a bore, a necessary labor before the main passion. In other words, he was woefully unprepared for the sheer incandescent delight of opening James on his fingers. 

How could he ever have thought this would be dull, passionless, somehow not enough? The pure and burning intimacy of it - James’ body yielding to his by degrees, making a space for Francis within himself - was overwhelming. He watched the place where first one, then two of his fingers disappeared into the pink stretch of James’ hole with what could best be described as reverence; listened to the little exclamatory groans James was making with a wish to remember them all in perfect detail. What a gift he was being given in this taking.

“Crook your fingers,” James murmured down the expanse of heaving satin that was his chest, and when Francis did he made a sound entirely new: a long keening sigh that sounded driven out of him by force. Francis’ entire body felt alight - as if the burning inside of James had transferred its divine essentials to the outside of himself. He continued with his two fingers until James bade him add a third, then a fourth; continued with the slow and steady exploration of how far James would stretch and slacken around him, what noises he could draw from James by this charting of his passage. 

The hole he left when he pulled his fingers out was gaping unbelievably wide, clenching weakly around where he used to be. “Francis,” James whined - truly, that was the only word for it, a high noise like a rusty metal gate in need of oil - “Francis, please.”

Francis glanced up from his work to regard James, all mussed hair and hands clenching in the sheets. He could not help but marvel at his self-assurance - the easy shamelessness and the certainty of his own body’s whims that had him gasping and begging for Francis to fuck him on his fingers. It was, he knew, a hard-won ease; he felt keenly the trust that coursed between them, flowing around and within, letting James show him the soft underside of himself. As such, he believed he could be forgiven for wanting to savor it a bit. He held James’ gaze and replied, with a glinting smile, “Please, what?”

James sighed high and frustrated, thumped a fist on the bed. “Good christ, Francis. Fuck me hard and fast with that fat yard at the end of your wrist or I shall go mad.” 

Francis felt a hot pulse from his own sex at this brazen demand; he gasped, touched his slit to be certain he would not drip onto the sheets. The stuttering groan James loosed to see him touch himself thus gave him an idea; he swiped his fingers into his sex to gather what was drooling from it and used his own slick to ease his way back into James’ eager cunny. It welcomed him in greedily, pulling and sucking at his fingers like a hungry mouth. “Faster,” James gasped, “please, Francis—”

Francis huffed a laugh. “I’ve barely gotten in,” he chided. “Insatiable, you are.”

“Yes.” James nodded wildly as Francis began to pump his hand in with more vigor. “Yes, yes. I am. Please. Please?” He was babbling, legs twitching, cock drooling where it stood up obscene and untouched. Francis leant to kiss the briny blushing tip of it, still driving into James with his hand, and James’ hips twitched violently upwards. He withdrew, tossed James a look. “None of that, now.” This earned him a wordless groan and a fluttering little clutch about his hand - something that bore further exploration. 

He drummed over the little bundle of nerves within James - another facet of pleasure he had heard about from time to time, but never touched upon himself - and watched as his prick jerked and leaked out slick. “Do you think—” He bit his lip, stammering in spite of himself. He had not talked this way to a lover before, but he had _been_ talked to thus; it should not be a blushing matter. “Do you think you can come just from my fingers in your cunt, darling?”

“Yes.” James rolled his eyes about in his head to find Francis’ face, to implore him with a foggy flashing gaze. “Yes, please. I want to. Make me, please.”

With this directive eclipsing all coherent thought, Francis set himself to the task of James’ pleasure with a fervid intensity. He drank in every sound from James’ mouth, every drag of his fingers within James’ passage; felt the slow slick slide of his own pleasure like a hazy backdrop to the scene they two were making. When the weather-deck rolling of James’ hips came at last to a stuttering seizing halt, when his cock spurted hot and filthy onto his bare folded stomach, Francis felt James’ orgasm almost as his own. He rubbed his thighs together absently as he watched James come down from it, trying to relieve the unsated boil of his own arousal as it flared and spit within him. 

Finally James groaned and twisted about, scrubbed a hand over his face; Francis drew out his fingers with an unmentionable sound. “Lord,” James sighed. “Look how you’ve undone me.” Francis smiled at him, watching as he shuffled up gingerly to a seated position: he did indeed look quite debauched. His face had gone red like the first kiss of a sunburn; his hair was irretrievably disarrayed; his bodice sat askew about his chest and shoulders, barely ridden up high enough to be out of danger from the splatter of seed that still glazed the downy trail of his stomach. He was quite a vision.

He twisted in place then, baring the curve of his back to Francis: “Unbutton me, would you please?”

James sighed luxuriantly as his arms and torso came free of the garment, rubbing over his chest in a motion that made Francis dearly wish to do the same. He slipped his hands around James’ flanks, grasped the handfuls of his sweet little tits and stroked, front pressed to James’ back and nose in his neck. James gasped and squirmed a bit into the touch. “Oh,” he sighed. “Francis. I’ve had my turn, dear man. I want to give _you_ pleasure, now.”

Francis hummed into his neck. “This is giving me pleasure,” he countered, punctuating the words with a squeeze at each of James’ nipples. 

James groaned - half pleasure, half exasperation - and dropped his head back onto Francis’ shoulder. “Really,” he said. “What would you have of me?”

“I don’t…” Francis’ hands stilled, his mouth twisted. He had the urge to hide his face. “Whatever you wish.” When James stared stony back at him, he added, “Truly. I will make it known if it disagrees with me.”

James chewed his cheek for a moment, evidently weighing his options. Finally he turned fully back around to face Francis and said: “I wonder— Would you let me use my mouth on you?”

Francis considered. He was more in the way of giving such treatment than receiving it, but the sparse ensemble of his previous lovers had without exception gone wild for it. He had himself avoided being touched in the past, even with a hand, other than through or within his trousers; he did not like the vulnerability of it, the bare proof of his being that came with nakedness. It would be difficult, he believed, for them to see Francis’ sex and still view him as a man afterwards. But it was not difficult for James; his James, respectful without being over-delicate, easy without being flippant. He estimated that were he to let James bury his face in his cunt for hours on end, he would get up at the end of it and be precisely the same man in James’ eyes as he was at the beginning. “Yes,” he nodded. “Yes, I would like that.”

He expected to be turned onto his back, but instead James slid down the bed again and nudged Francis with a hand around his thigh until he was kneeling astride James’ face. _Oh._ James smiled up at him, intolerably roguish; Francis could feel his breath where it huffed out mere inches from the lake of his slit. 

James’ broad hands stroked up Francis’ thighs, slipped into the creases of them, thumbed through the tangled auburn bush of his pubic hair to unsheathe his little cock where it sat throbbing in its hood. “Oh,” James moaned - Francis had to resist twitching down into the breeze of his breath. “Look at that fat little cock.” Francis’ face colored, but the clench of his slit where James’ other thumb was stroking through the slick of it gave him away. “Such a handsome prick. Just the perfect size to fit in my mouth, hmm?” 

Without waiting for reply he guided Francis’ hips down with a hand slipped round to his arse, leaned up smartly to take Francis into his mouth and _sucked._ And oh, good lord, if Francis had known that this was what he’d been missing— Well, in any case, he thought - somewhat vaguely, as this musing coincided with James’ tongue dipping down in a lazy oblong through his dripping slit - he was glad, glad it was James. 

He left off thinking for long stretches then, as James continued to display hitherto unknown feats of prowess with his lips and tongue and teeth. He knew that he was rolling his hips down onto James’ face only by the friction it afforded him; knew that his hands were gripping and tangling in James’ hair only by the vibrations caused by James’ resultant moans. Over and again he felt James flick frantically over his cock with a pointed tongue, heard the soft suckling sound as he lapped slick from the hole below, saw the shining mess his face had become from nose to chin when he pulled off to take a breath. 

Francis had decided long ago that James was worth it - worth living clandestinely, worth baring his body and his heart against long-calcified instincts toward secrecy, worth hauling to salvation on a boat or on a sledge or on his own damned back - worth everything Francis could give. But he thought, as he looked down at James lying supplicant under him and coaxing him apart with skillful surety, that if he had had a sliver of a doubt this would dissolve it. This body of his had always been so far removed from its own pleasure, twisted around itself protectively like a knot fused by time, used for anything but its own whim; to have it handled thus after all these years - like he was a being made for the receipt of pleasure, masculine, known, deserving - was revolutionary. The dance of James’ tongue around him, the slurping suction, as if it were any other cock, affirmed him; the pairing of such treatment with those little singularities of James’ technique, the plunging swipes of tongue and nipping teeth at the edges of him, made him feel flayed open to the core. Dangerously bare; yet there was no danger here, only James’ body beneath him and the crashing surge of his own pleasure. Only James’ hands stroking over his arse and James’ tongue circling his cock mercilessly and James’ voice murmuring all muffled and wet, _Come, come for me, love._ And like that, he was - driving his hips down onto James’ waiting mouth, wracked by his orgasm like a full-body fizz in his blood, as visceral a passion as he had ever felt. 

James drank in tirelessly what Francis gave, then continued to lick around him until he began twitching away, too sensitive to bear continued attentions. When Francis rolled off him, James came up onto his elbows and fixed him with the sort of wide joyful grin that crinkled his eyes and massaged the lines of his face into something new and remarkable. “Pleased with yourself, are you,” Francis deadpanned, but he was smiling back. _You should be pleased. You’ve taken my soul in your hands like clay._ He felt remade - party to a cataclysmic personal shift, as if he had gone to bed sailing the Atlantic and woken for his watch in the Mediterranean. Warm airs and calm waters.

He made to kiss James - reconsidered - reconsidered again amid James’ snort and caught his smiling sticky lips to impart a small fragment of what he was feeling. _Thank you for knowing me so well. Thank you for loving me as I never thought I would be loved._ _Thank you for letting me love you in return._ One day he would beat through the tangle his mind made of words such as these to find the right ones - quite possibly with some crude and fumbling interludes, he supposed, if history were to repeat itself. For now he let James tuck his head into his bare shoulder - his shirt had come half-undone sometime or other, and he had not even noticed - and tried to comb out the mess of that long hair with his esteemed captain’s fingers. They had all the time in the world. 

**Author's Note:**

> additional content warnings:  
> \- period-typical not-being-able-to-live-openly  
> \- francis' genitals are referred to as a cunt exactly once, for purposes of rhetoric; otherwise i used "cock/little cock", "sex", and "slit"  
> \- james' sex characteristics are referred to as "cock/prick", "cunt/cunny/hole", and "tits"


End file.
